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Budget: No real spending boost for public education
The only real spending boost for B.C. public schools in the coming year will be a modest, previously announced fund to help teachers deal with special-needs students in their increasingly diverse classrooms, according to budget documents released today.
But apart from that new learning investment fund, which will distribute $30 million next year and a total of $165 million over three years, the basic grant for public education is expected to remain relatively flat for three years at an annual $4.7 billion a year. Average spending for K-12 schools will grow at only 0.6 per cent next year, down from 1.1 per cent during the previous two years and 4.8 per cent between 2005-06 and 2008-09.
The post-secondary sector faces similar restraints.
In delivering his budget today, Finance Minister Kevin Falcon urged the 60 school districts – especially 17 in and around Metro Vancouver – to reduce costs by sharing more head-office functions. Districts now spend about $840 million a year on administration, operations, maintenance and transportation services and could expect savings of three to eight per cent by following the Health Ministry’s approach to shared services, budget documents suggest.
It’s advice school officials have been hearing for years.
In addition, school districts, universities, colleges and others in the public sector are being told to sell surplus properties to raise money for other projects. A recent government review identified more than 100 surplus properties and estimated that disposal of some could produce a net gain of about $700 million. Falcon said 40 per cent of those properties are in the education sector and proceeds could help finance other capital projects.
As expected, the budget offers no money for a pay hike for B.C. teachers, whose union recently proposed a 15 per cent increase in a three-year deal. The B.C. Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) and the B.C. Public School Employers’ Association have made little progress during almost 12 months of bargaining, and a government fact finder is expected to report by Thursday on whether a negotiated deal is possible.
“Let me be perfectly clear,” Falcon stated in his budget speech. “We are not prepared to borrow money to pay for public-sector wage increases today and send the bill to our children tomorrow.”
The post-secondary sector also received a tough message, with government calling for reductions in administrative budgets by $20 million in 2013-14 and $50 million in 2014-15. Savings must come from travel, executive overhead and support services, but not classrooms, the minister said.
“The province will work with universities, colleges and other institutions to help ensure that front-line programs are not affected,” he told the legislature. “And we believe (this) one per cent cost reduction is very achievable.”
As in the K-12 sector, the average annual increases for post-secondary are shrinking – to 1.6 per cent a year in the coming three years from 3.4 per cent during the past two years and 6.5 per cent between 2005-06 and 2008-09. Annual spending for post-secondary is about $5 billion.
Overall, education will consume a smaller percentage of annual government spending at 26.8 per cent in 2012-13 compared to 27.6 per cent two years ago.
Written by: Janet Steffenhagen
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TD National Reading Summit III: Vancouver, B.C. May 2nd to 5th, 2012
Creating a National Reading Strategy for Canada: About the National Reading Campaign
The National Reading Campaign is about creating a reading strategy for Canada. It is about engaging Canadians in exploring what a Canadian reading plan would look like, and what we would expect the key outcomes to be. In short, it is a campaign to incorporate and promote reading as a central feature of 21st century Canadian citizenship.
The National Reading Campaign had its beginnings in 2008, when a coalition of readers, parents, writers, editors, librarians, bookstore owners, teachers, publishers and distributors came together to assess and consider the changing reading habits of Canadians. Learn more about the Reading Coalition here.
The first forum, held in 2008, proposed that a National Reading Campaign be developed over the course of three Reading Summits. The first Summit was held in Toronto in 2009, the second was held in Montreal in 2011 and the third will take place in May 2012 in Vancouver.
Why do we need a National Reading Campaign?
Becoming a reader is at the very heart of responsible citizenship. But as we find ourselves caught in the fierce updrafts of an information hurricane, we often lose sight of what reading — as an intellectual activity — contributes to our sense of self, our cultural awareness, our capacity for self-expression and, ultimately, our notions of engaged citizenship and the collective good. Reading, after all, is about so much more than a technical act that allows us to communicate, consume media and perform the activities of daily life. To be literate is necessary, but it is not enough.
Read more about the Summit here.
~information and links from the National Reading Campaign website
This Just In: New Book at Education Library
Silent Moments in Education:
An Autoethnography of Learning, Teaching, and Learning to Teach
Colette A. Granger’s highly original book considers moments in several areas of education in which silence may serve as both a response to difficulty and a means of working through it. The author, a teacher educator, presents narratives and other textual artefacts from her own experiences of learning and instruction. She analyses them from multiple perspectives to reveal how the qualities of education’s silences can make them at once difficult to observe and challenging to think about.
Silent Moments in Education combines autoethnography with psychoanalytic theory and critical discourse analysis in a unique consideration of the relations teachers and learners forge with knowledge, with ideas, and with one another. This provocative and thoughtful work invites scholars and educators to consider the multiple silences of participants in education, and to respond to them with generosity and compassion.
~from University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division © 2011
Year-round schooling within five years: Vancouver
We’ve heard before that Vancouver school district is considering year-round schooling, but still I was surprised by the lead paragraph in a story today in the Globe and Mail.
“Vancouver students may soon have to say goodbye to their two-month summer vacation. Over the next five years, the Vancouver School Board’s superintendent of schools, Steve Cardwell, plans to move the district to a year-round calendar.”
Later, he’s quoted as saying he expects three to six schools will have a balanced calendar by September 2012 or 2013. That sounds doable. But a district-wide change in five years??
The story prompted a tweet Tuesday morning from board chairwoman Patti Bacchus asking: “OK people, what do you think?”
Good question.
District communications manager Kurt Heinrich said discussions about year-round schooling are community driven, with the greatest interest emerging at Thunderbird elementary school.
February 14, 2012. 11:57 am • Section: Report Card
By Janet Steffenhagen, Vancouver Sun
jsteffenhagen@vancouversun.com
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